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Comment by l5870uoo9y | Hacker News Reader

What does it cost to host a 400TB database?

Enterprise grade nvme ssd's typically cost around 150$/TB. For RF of 3, this comes to around: 400 x 3 x 150: 180K USD. With a minimum of 5 year lifecycle for these enterprise SSD's, we are looking at 36K USD/year.

Going through their pricing (https://planetscale.com/pricing?engine=vitess&cluster=M-5120...), for just 15TB storage with RF=3, the pricing comes to around 24000 USD/MONTH, not year. Adjusted for 400TB and per year, this becomes 7.6 million usd. Of course, you also get a lot more, but, the difference is just insane.

That comparison doesn't make any sense at all, and you can't excuse it by tossing out "Of course, you also get a lot more". This is like evaluating the price of wheels by buying entire cars. You wouldn't get dozens of these servers just for capacity, you'd get a custom quote.

That said at $24K you could pay off an entire server like that from Dell in 4 months despite Dell charging something stupid like $2000/TB.

Lets hear your numbers then.

Your numbers are basically fine for what you're measuring, if you round up to factor in actually having servers to put the storage drives into. So 40-50k instead of 36k.

The issue is your budget is for 400TB of data but minimal requests per second. That's a valid thing to consider, but it's extremely apples and oranges to a fleet of 75 high powered servers.

To put it a different way, their prices are pretty high but the calculation of powerful servers costing 40x as much as raw storage isn't "insane".

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